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Alanna

the First Adventure
May 03, 2017susan_findlay rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
If I had read this when I was 10 or 12, I'm sure I would have given it 5 stars. At 40+, I only read it because it was a book club selection. Despite that, I enjoyed it a lot and I'll likely read the rest of the series at some point. As the first book in a series of four, this book has a lot of set-up work to do. For this reason, the first third (or so) is quite slow. It does pick up, though, and turn into a quick and entertaining read. The book requires a fair amount of suspension of disbelief that nobody will realize "Alan" is really "Alanna" unless and until she tells them. But it's set in a land where magic is real, so perhaps we are to believe that she uses a little magic to make her masculinity more convincing. The book never actually says that she does this, but I'm not sure how else she was planning to fake her voice breaking. It does take the time to address a few other biological issues you'd expect a girl pretending to be a boy to have to deal with.